Janet Mead’s 1974 hit recording of ‘The Lord’s Prayer’; Mead was a teacher (at Adelaide’s St. Aloysius College) who had been invited to record Donovan’s ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon’ at Festival Records in Sydney with producer Martin Erdman; for the B side, she bashed out a version of the Lord’s Prayer with music arranged by Arnold Strals. ‘I simply sang a prayer I use daily to a new tempo,’ she explained.51 The song was a worldwide hit; it is rumoured to be the first Australian recording (as opposed to a recording made outside Australia by an Australian artist) to sell a million copies in the USA.
Less well-known today, although it was a phenomenon at its inception, is Rock Mass for Love, which began in Perth in 1970 under the sponsorship of the Very Rev. John Hazlewood. Claiming that ‘people had been alienated from Christ too long by narrow expressions of itchy-bitchy love,’ Hazlewood arranged for music written by 25-year-old Bruce Devenish to be performed by Perth’s top group, Bakery.52 They recorded a live album at a mass at St George’s Cathedral in Perth on 21 March 1971 that almost made the national top twenty.53 Bakery would go on to record one of the great progressive rock albums of the era, Momento, a 1972 recording which, sadly, has been largely forgotten. A film, Alpha and Omega, was made of the ‘Rock Mass’.54
Soon afterwards, impresario Harry M. Miller was conducting auditions for the Australian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar in the basement of Melbourne’s Metro Theatre.55 Many who were chosen would soon be big names, notably Jon English (as Judas), John Paul Young (as Annas) and Marcia Hines (an American who had come to Australia to appear in the stage production of Hair and replaced Michelle Fawdon as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar a year into the show’s run).56 Hines later became a well-loved pop star in Australia, with numerous hit singles between 1975 and 1981. English, who had been a member of Sydney band Sebastian Hardie, went on to be a television actor as well as scoring a run of hit singles.57 Less distinguished was the career of Trevor White, who went from playing Jesus to releasing possibly the best dance-pop single of the 70s, ‘All You Want to Do Is Dance’ (1977), to . . . very little else.
Planet’s Sydney correspondent was blown away by the spectacle of Jesus Christ Superstar:
Visually the set is too much, too much altogether. The object which dominates is a 15-foot duodecahedron (I didn’t know either . . . anyway it’s a 12-sided figure). The top half lifts off . . . the five sides open like petals and there is a centre plate which acts as a lift and sinks down to become a trapdoor . . . and it rotates, the whole damn thing rotates . . . The duodecahedron reminded me of a cross between a lunar module, a water lily and a venus fly trap. The set is a massive distraction. It appears to be audience-orientated instead of concept-orientated.’58
Miller, whose career as a manager, publicist and entrepreneur has made him infamous in Australia for decades, began promoting international touring acts in 1961 with the Kingston Trio. He’d brought Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical to Australia in 1969.59 His success as a promoter in the early 70s notwithstanding, he was happy to describe Australian society at this time as a sandwich with a ‘strange soggy filling . . . an awful spaghetti in the middle.’
What’s happening now is that the person I call the man in the street, who does a damn hard day’s work, is reacting against the spaghetti filling because he’s becoming more informed . . . On the other side of the sandwich, are the true leaders.’60
Hair is often lauded as an icebreaker, perhaps even a groundbreaker, in Australia for the nudity and hippie politics it brought to the stage, but also for the stars it created. Many loved it; some were less than impressed; one of the unimpressed, Adrian ‘Avatar’ Linden, decided to create a rock musical of his own, Grass, for which Sven Libaek wrote the music. The show was about a girl, Janet Ant, who is prosecuted for smoking marijuana, and the mock-trial created by her friends.61
In a time of upheaval and dissent, confusers abounded. The so-called ‘Wonderful Wizard of Aussie’, Ian Channell, inaugurated ALF – the Australian Liberation Front for Action, Love and Freedom, and, in the early 70s, became ‘official resident merlin of the University of New South Wales.’62 Channell attacked student activists and suggested their issues were ‘poisonous bullshit’.63 He later saw the attractions of a wider realm and moved to New Zealand to become wizard of an entire dominion.
AIR PLAY
The 1970 ‘Radio Ban’ proved to be a watershed in the history of Australian popular music. The vagaries of the music industry and the corresponding unpredictability of chart success make it hard to state anything with certainty, but the ban might well have killed off some careers prematurely (or justifiably) and boosted a number of others. Examples of pop stars whose careers might have been very different without the ban include late 60s performers such as Johnny Young, Issi Dy, Ronnie Burns and Ross D. Wyllie; those who benefited included the group later known as Mississippi but at the time called Allison Gros, as well as other Fable label artists. Paul Conn, in his 2000 Weeks, sees a direct relation between the radio ban and a ‘stimulus given to non-commercial music’.64 Certainly by the time the dispute ended in October, with the radio stations retaining their right to play music without paying record companies for the privilege, a reset button had been pushed on the music scene.
Since the mid 50s, record companies had agreed to accept as ‘payment’ for allowing their recordings to be played on the radio a mandatory (short) period per day during which their new releases would be played – something that amounted to free advertising for all the major labels.65 But these internationally owned labels, along with Rupert Murdoch’s label Festival, had grown dissatisfied with the arrangement, arguing that they were essentially providing free content to radio stations. Through their organization, the Australian Performing Rights Association, they attempted to negotiate a new deal with the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters, pushing for financial compensation based on airplay. The radio stations rejected this on the grounds that they were providing promotion, thus spurring sales; the Bulletin described the dispute as a question of ‘just who is doing whom a service.’66
Negotiations broke down in late May 1970,67, and the big labels imposed a six-month freeze on the supply of new records to radio; the broadcasters in return imposed a ban on playing new releases by those labels, as well as excluding them from the regional top-forty charts which they compiled. Consequently, many records released at this time did not get airplay – others, such as Spectrum’s 1971 hit ‘I’ll Be Gone’, were held back until the dispute was resolved. With his usual poor spelling Stan Rofe announced:
The ban effects new records by Russell Morris, Doug Parkinson, Ross D. Wyllie, Normie Rowe, Jeff St John, Ronnie Charles, Issi Dy and the Sect.
‘I’ve waited months to put this one out,’ rued Issi Dy of his new single, ‘now it’ll probably die, without airplay.’68 (It did, whatever the reason.) Russell Morris, who already had two chart-toppers under his belt, was conciliatory: ‘The only good thing that may come out of it is the new labels which will spring up (such as the Fable label), which won’t be involved in the dispute. Artists who normally wouldn’t be given a chance by the larger companies could get on this way, and the scene will gain some new acts.’69
The Fable label – under the aegis of Ron Tudor, formerly of W&G – certainly benefited from the radio ban, most specifically through their middle-of-the-road singer Liv Maessen, who made number one in mid-May with a version of Mary Hopkin’s ‘Knock, Knock Who’s There’ (the original, like many UK hits of that period, had fallen victim to the ban), and the Mixtures, who covered Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’ and hit number one in August. Within a year the Mixtures would have a number two single in Britain with their own, very similar ‘The Pushbike Song’.70 The band’s Mick Flynn would be back in Australia a few years later touring as half of Pussyfoot, with a revoltingly coy number one single entitled ‘The Way That You Do It’.71 An ad for Fable in Go-Set featured not only Maessen but also folksinger John Williamson’s